AmericanCinematographer201201

◗ Go with the Flow
the rendered ACES information
[OCES, or Output Color Encoding
Space] to a specific display device.
“When you’re not in a DCIcompliant,
projection-standard, colorspace
environment, variations in
monitor calibration can dramatically
impact what you perceive in your
image,” continues Clark. “You initially
trust that the display reference is properly
calibrated and configured for the
appropriate color space, but you might
actually find that isn’t the case, and your
reference isn’t really a reference at all. In
that situation, you just don’t know
exactly what you’re looking at. It’s
imperative to ensure that the calibration
and color-space settings of the display
device being used are proper for whatever
distribution platform the project is
geared toward, whether digital cinema
or HDTV.”
“CRTs have been dying [in colorcorrection
suites] for several years now,”
notes Bajpai, “but even those do not
truly represent what will be seen on a
plasma or LCD screen today. The most
important aspect of a color-correction
environment is being able to predictably
set your viewing environment to a
“Even CRTs don’t
truly represent what
will be seen on a
plasma or LCD
screen today.”
specific set of specs so that when you’re
looking at white, it’s white, and when
you’re looking at black, it’s black. Even
with pro-grade plasma sets, it’s impossible
to match one with another when you
put them side-by-side.”
Having an output image transformed
to the specific, calibrated device
on which it will finally be displayed
seems like an obvious idea, but having a
working color space and workflow
process that can easily move between
any of the delivery formats, be it DCI
P3 for theatrical distribution or Rec 709
for HDTV, is a unique feature of the
IIF. Bajpai elaborates, “In the colorcorrection
suite, when you start with a
Rec 709 color space and try to colorcorrect
that image, you can actually see
how quickly you lose details. By
contrast, when you’re working from the
original logarithmic image with an IDT
into ACES color space, you can see how
much dynamic range you’re able to
maintain. With IIF-ACES, everything
just sort of falls into place, and you don’t
have to struggle to get the image to
balance out or retain detail.”
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